[impendia]

> Seriously though, limiting it to STEM majors would goose academia in the right direction.

What is this supposed to mean?!

If you don't know, humanities programs are being badly squeezed already. Some programs are being cut entirely. I have a friend who is earning her Ph.D. in comp lit, and she (with all of her colleagues) are seriously scared that her field will no longer exist in 20 years.

And all this, despite the fact that undergraduate courses in the humanities are, according to my friend, as popular as ever.

[potatolicious]

Don't be so surprised - it seems that haughty dismissal of all things non-technical is a trademark of geeky communities. See: reddit, slashdot, etc.

[hugh3]

I don't dismiss the humanities, but I do think that doing a PhD in 'em is very unlikely to be a good career move, and that government funding of humanities PhDs is very unlikely to be a good use of money, nor of human talent.

[potatolicious]

I'll agree that a PhD in the humanities is unlikely to be a good career move - but that is unrelated to whether or not it is in the public interest to fund them.

A career in fundamental scientific research is also a poor career move - my brother is in it himself. It's grossly underpaid, funding is hard fought and won, and job security isn't great either.

But it would be hard to argue against funding it publicly.

By so easily dismissing the worthwhileness of its pursuit, and by claiming that it is unworthy of governmental funding, you are dismissing the humanities.

But again, unsurprising given the company we're in. To a large contingent of us tech nerds, the humanities would always be a "if we have some spare time and money" subject, never given any importance until all technical subjects (or in this case, funding need) have been exhausted.

The odd thing is, I know a lot of people in other technical fields - physics and chemistry, for example, and yet none of them exhibit the same tendencies. It seems that dismissiveness for the arts is somewhat unique to engineers and CS.

[gruseom]

It's a symptom of mental narrowness, and working with computers a lot does, in my experience, narrow the mind. It has a kind of digitizing effect on one's brain, causing it to see everything in discrete terms, which is to say binary terms, which may explain why tech nerds tend to be so rigid in their judgments. Anything that "does not compute" gets rejected. The mind becomes increasingly oriented to things that work the way computers work. Arts and humanities are far removed from that. Moreover, our technocratic age no longer assigns them any elevated status by default, so you have to seek them out, and few care to do so.

Perhaps physicists and chemists are less vulnerable to this effect because their work is concerned with nature. There has long been an alliance between nature and art in the human sphere.

[impendia]

> I do think that doing a PhD in 'em is very unlikely to be a good career move

Outstanding hackers have the luxury that what they love overlaps with what makes good money.

If you love literature, and know that you are taking on a career where, if you are very lucky, you will make $55k in an isolated town, I see nothing foolish about starting a Ph.D. in the subject.

[nobody314159]

Many jobs require a degree.

Those jobs that only require you to wear a suit don't care what the degree is in.

Now if your future job only depends on your grade - not the subject which would you choose? Studying maths/physics/etc for 4years or doing psychology/media studies/american studies.

[impendia]

I don't know anybody that took nothing other than math classes for four years of undergrad... and I majored in math, and subsequently went to grad school in it.

[hugh3]

I took only maths and physics classes for my final three years of undergrad. In first year, I also took chemistry and computer science.

No, I didn't go to uni in the US.